Ancient Israelite Cosmogeography
Introduction
The recently released images of our universe captured by the James Webb space telescope bring home just how ancient and vast it is. Currently, the universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old, and while we don’t know how large the entire universe is, the observable universe is estimated to be around 93 billion light years in diameter, and consists of around 200 billion galaxies.
The current view of the universe as an unimaginably vast expanse containing hundreds of billions of galaxies is a fairly recent view, dating back around 100 years. Prior to the early 20th century, astronomers believed the Milky Way composed the entire universe, and what we now know as galaxies were called spiral nebulae and believed to be located in the far reaches of the Milky Way. We know that the sun is not the centre of the universe, but that view only appeared in the late 18th to early 19th centuries following considerable astronomical observation and theorising. Heliocentric cosmology, which argues that the earth revolves around the Sun was famously advanced in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus, though was first proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC. Belief in a spherical earth first appeared among a number of Pythagorean philosophers in the 5th century BC. Prior to then, ancient people believed that the earth was flat, covered by a solid dome, and lay at the centre of the universe.
